By Rusty Dawkins
Meteorologist
Most people have heard of the meteorologist and many have heard of the climatologist, both of which are important people to know when it comes to learning more about our current weather or the weather not too long ago. But there are a group of scientists who take the art of climatology a step further and these are the paleoclimatologists. Like the climatologist, they are interested in weather that happened in the past but the paleoclimatologist is interested in the weather that happened thousands of years ago. They search for different fossils to analyze which will tell the researchers a lot about potential past climates. Some evidence from fossils of temperature sensitive organisms near the equator suggests that the equatorial climate was several degrees cooler on average 8,500 years ago. These scientists have also found that water temperatures on the coast of Greenland were several degrees warmer than they are now. What led these scientists to believe this is based on findings from fossil shells of species of warm water mollusks that lived in the region at the time. It’s thanks to the paleoclimatologist that we are learning more about past ice ages and heat waves and it may give us clues for what to expect thousands of years from now.
Weather Last Week
Aug 11: 49/86/0”
Aug 12: 53/88/0”
Aug 13: 59/99/0”
Aug 14: 50/101/0.07”
Aug 15: 57/97/0.14”
Aug 16: 62/96/0”
Aug 17: 59/92/0”
Forecast discussion for the week ahead:
After a very hot first part of the week, a taste of fall is headed our way! Temperatures will be well into the 90s on Thursday, but we won’t warm up much past the upper 70s going into the weekend. This cool down is because of a few cold fronts which will give us several chances at rain.